The scrapbook
Not a backpack — a scrapbook. Materials, sketches, plans, critter notes, photos, house memories, gifts from neighbours. It is the inventory and the record of everyone you met.
no quest log · pin your own projects
the tour
A tour of
the craft table.
Six things, in the order you'd meet them. None of it is a grind, and none of it is on a timer you didn't choose.
one — the first thing you do
You are a drawing.
Shape first — a silhouette from the library, or an outline you draw yourself. Then paper stock, then a printed pattern, then crayon on top. Then stamps: eyes, mouths, hair, and limbs that are allowed to hang outside the cutout, because a crayon stroke can never make an arm.
Your drawing decides nothing about how you move. Hidden body presets — small, wide, tall, wheeled, hovering — come from the shape you chose, so a big flourish never buys a big hitbox.
Nothing here is a commitment. You can redraw yourself whenever you like.
two — how you get better tools
Plans are knowledge.
Every plan past the starter set is learned from a knowledge tree, and nowhere else. Plans are never found, sold, gifted, or mailed.
A node is paid for in patience — real-world time that runs while the game is closed — or in doing, and either one finishes it alone. One node at a time. No queue to optimise, no notifications, nothing purchasable, nothing totalled.
-
Kids' scissors Loose paper only. Never breaks. -
Sturdy scissors The gate for redwood bark. -
Flimsy shovel One dent at a time. Dents stay dents. -
Garden hoe One garden bed at a time. -
Basic mallet Tape joins and corner tabs. -
Standard hammer A roof that stays folded.
The Professor
A paperclip with googly eyes, dark-rimmed glasses and a graduation cap. He opens the tree, reads a book while something is being learned, and shows a friendly face when nothing is. He shows ambient state, never a score. He never speaks unprompted. He is never called Clippy.
three — who else lives here
Ask a squirrel
about this place.
Critters wander, react with mild curiosity, and will tell you things. Four lanes of answers, all repeatable: what grows here and what tool you'd need, how long a seed takes and what it yields, which landmarks are a short walk away, and the local gossip.
Personality changes which kind of answer comes first. It never hides one. And they remember what they told you — a squirrel who knew the whole map would be an index, not a neighbour.
Bark curls? You'd want sturdier scissors than those. Try the far side of the pines, where it's damp.
four — how big the world is
A neighbourhood
is a stack of pages.
Not metres — pages. Square sheets that hold terrain, paths, props, resources and permissions. Some are authored exactly, some are grown from a seed, most are authored structure with the details rolled.
Distant hills live in a parallax backdrop behind tracing-paper haze, so far away actually looks far away.
Water goes creek to river to something Mississippi, bending across pages, throwing off waterfalls and swamps, ending in a lake. Width and depth are functions of distance from the source. You can always wade — deep water is where a boat becomes useful, never where you die. A river is never a wall: bridges, docks and beaches come with it.
salmon ribbonwood, aqua folded pebbles, graphite cardstone, plaid bark. a harvested material visually remembers where it came from.
— the material rule
five — chips, shops, mail
A quiet
little economy.
One price table for the whole world, so there is no price-shopping. Chips are shown as a pouch balance and nothing else — no session totals, no earnings summary, no tallies anywhere, ever.
- Loose material or a spare seed₡1
- Garden produce₡2
- A seed packet, one at a time₡2
- Two paper fibersbarter for any packet
- Recycle a toolchips — a material, noticeably fewer
Generosity payoffs
A trinket brought round by a critter who heard you did something nice. Kept small, rare, and worth less than the thing you gave, on purpose — otherwise it becomes a farming loop.
random · non-fungible · never itemised
six — under the paper
It runs
in a browser.
Web first, hostable on your own machine for a LAN, and eventually packaged for a desktop. TypeScript, Three.js and Colyseus, with a great deal of tape.
A plain URL is always solo and never opens a socket. The invite code is the only door into a shared neighbourhood — that is enforced in the client, not just promised here.
The first playtest is three to five people, one neighbourhood, and one or two specific questions per build. If that sounds like your idea of a good evening, say so.
